Unmissable gibberish

The second Matrix movie tries hard to be profound, but the biggest question it poses is: doesn't this look fantastic? Tim Robey reports

Po-faced: The Matrix: Reloaded

Tim Robey

12:01AM BST 23 May 2003

For those of us whose idea of a great night out at the cinema is to watch impossible stuff flashing up on screen even more expensively than the last time, The Matrix Reloaded is all but unmissable. It's also gibberish.

Only one science fiction film in the last quarter century has, to my mind, really managed to use its visual effects - to deploy them in the service of something greater than their own instant gobsmack value. That film is Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and, in its austerely eloquent way, it seriously asks us the most profound of all philosophical questions: what it means to be human.

What the Wachowski brothers are asking us in their Matrix films is not quite clear. How it might feel to be inside Keanu Reeves's head? (Not quite the same thing, really.) Whether the world is in fact one big virtual reality game, our species the subjugated plaything of an alien race? (Read Descartes's Meditations instead.) No, for all its dime-store ontology, the question that The Matrix repeatedly places at the forefront of our consciousness is this: doesn't it all look fantastic?

To that one, I throw my hands up in the air. The Matrix Reloaded is nothing if not a coruscating effects wow. (It's nothing but a coruscating effects wow.) It has three or four sequences that go so far beyond the boundaries of what's been achieved before on screen that you literally can't believe what you're seeing.

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The fusion of live action and computer graphics isn't seamless - Reeves's face takes on a perceptibly rendered look, familiar from the animated "synthespians" of Final Fantasy - but in any case, as often here, we're being asked less to suspend our disbelief than to actively embrace it, slack-jawed.

The most satisfying set-piece by far is an epic freeway battle half an hour before the end, precisely because so much of it, unlike Neo's more gravity-defying fights, pulls off the illusion of obeying the basic laws of physics. A mile and a half of road was specially constructed to shoot it, and watching Trinity (the largely wasted Carrie-Anne Moss) weave in and out of high-speed traffic on a Ducati motorbike, it's suddenly exhilarating - and novel - to watch a real, concrete, good old-fashioned stunt happening before your eyes.

There's no point expending too many column inches on the plot: it manages to be easy enough to follow and fundamentally inexplicable at the same time. Suffice it to say that the messianic Neo, his mentor Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), Trinity and fellow freedom fighters are on the eve of all-out war between human enclave Zion and the alien Sentinels.

We begin with a premonition of Trinity's death, leading to all sorts of woolly lecturing on issues of choice, free will, determinism, and blah blah blah. Every five minutes we pause so that the characters can sit each other down, put their sunglasses on, and say something like: "Causality - we are forever slaves to it," "The anomaly is systemic" or "What this evening might hold for us is the very meaning of our lives." The Wachowskis clearly want the audience to feel the same way.

Never is The Matrix Reloaded weighed down with a more fatal sense of its own importance than in these dialogues, which account for practically half its running time. It would be one thing if they were intelligently integrated with the exciting bits. Instead, they're grafted on like random off-cuts from a sixth-form philosophy thesis. "How do you know?" "I know because I must know," says one of far too many minor characters whose only function is, well, to know. "There is no escaping reason and no denying purpose," declares the insufferably mannered Weaving, wrapping his mouth around the word "reason" as if slurping an ice cube.

There's no real cleverness here - just the most sophisticated stupidity ever stuck up on screen. At least the 1999 original bounced off a nifty, if well-worn, basic conceit: Everyman wakes up to discover that his life is a fiction. It had the excitement of progressive discovery, as Neo gradually peeled back the curtain to behold the sinister workings of the world behind.

Those secrets exposed, we now enter a more cosmic arena in which the precise rules of engagement are confusingly up for grabs. (Is Neo indestructible? His powers, unlike the carefully defined ones of the X-Men, seem virtually limitless.) In all sorts of ways, this is beginning to turn into Star Wars, and not good Star Wars. Phantom Menace Star Wars.

Like George Lucas, the Wachowskis leave far too much to chance with their leading actors. Reeves, bless him, is an unintentionally perfect poster-boy for the franchise: the lights are on, but nobody's home. Trying to express profound metaphysical bafflement, he still just looks as if he's worried he left his keys in the ignition. Fishburne, lips pursed and arms held behind his back, is a humourless, hectoring, crashing bore. The best performance in the original came from Joe Pantoliano as rebel turncoat Cypher, and his distinctively sarky presence is much missed.

If The Matrix Reloaded had even the slightest inkling of its own ridiculousness, it would be exponentially easier to cut it some slack. At the end of the credits there's a trailer for the final act, The Matrix Revolutions, which comes out in November, but something Cartesian had long since transpired. My body was still sitting there; my mind had split.